Editorial: Why cut back on healthy information?

Updated 7:27 pm, Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Back under former Gov. George Pataki, New York took a forward-thinking step to better track pesticide use. Unfortunately, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is looking to reverse that — and deprive the public of important information.

This is an aspect of the public's right to know that we don't always consider: whether government even gathers important information in the first place.

The 1996 pesticide law required pesticide firms to report to the state where they put down chemicals. It's not an onerous requirement: federal law already requires them to keep this information.

The data can be useful for researchers looking, for example, for correlations between health problems and pesticides, some of which can cause cancer or affect the nervous, hormone or endocrine systems.

But in the name of streamlining the process, Mr. Cuomo proposes to require only reporting of where pesticides are purchased — which may be miles away from where they actually end up. In a positive change, he also wants to capture residential use, not just commercial applications.

Even supporters of reporting acknowledge that a program that talks about floppy disks — remember those? — needs updating. And it needs to be less unwieldy for an overworked Department of Environmental Conservation.

But this is information government should collect and should make as public as possible. There may not be a huge demand for it right now. But as we learned with things like DDT and PCBs, humans have a way of thinking something is OK to put into the environment, only to learn years later that it was a bad idea. When that happens, it helps to know things like how much was used, and where.

Mr. Cuomo should be building on Mr. Pataki's program, not dismantling it.